Thursday, 27 November 2008

Fragments of Kaspar Stuff

When his parents split, Kaspar was distraught. He tried desperately to put it in perspective; he had heard storied of, and indeed known, children who had suffered much greater pains than he; indeed, as he would come to realise and, to an extent, already know, Kaspar had led a remarkably untroubled, even idyllic existence, a charmed childhood untouched by violence or poverty or hunger or fear or even a threat of any of these things; but your appreciation of any emotion can only be measured against the scale of your own experience. While the abstract spectrum of life’s possibilities stretches ever more impossibly to each horizon, Kaspar knew only his own little patch, comfortably toward the happier end of the range; for him, the end of his parents’ marriage was like suddenly developing the ability to see into the infrared.

I met Kaspar in Hyde Park in the summer of 20--, as we stood side-by-side watching the sun set over the Serpentine from the bridge at its western end. The wavelets graded away from milky black under us to shimmering pinks and off-whites around the island and the silhouetted pedaloes, bisected by a broad spit of blind white.

Just before the sun fell into the bank of clouds, there to enrich them with rubies and gold, a seagull flew towards us, banked and turned in the near-lilac overhead, and swooped low, following the narrowing white line and rising, a black kite, just as the sun dropped. The line became shorter, burnished. Herons skidded in, their undercarriages bobbing gently beneath them, and now the lake was awash with lapping pink, blue, white; the sun held itself a moment, a blazing amber setting false fire to the landscaped treetops, and fell away over a flotilla of origami seagulls.

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